He couldn't give her what she deserved right now. Not from this parking garage. But he could give her this.
Please don't think I didn't want to see you. I just need some time. I'm sorry.
He sent it.
Stared at the screen.
Put the phone down.
Started the engine and drove.
CHAPTER 13
The eighth floor was wrong before Emily reached it. She knew the way a morning was supposed to feel in Major Crimes by now. Over a year had built a rhythm. The elevator doors open, the bullpen hums, Claire is at her desk with coffee she made herself because the break room pot was criminal. Ray's door is open because Ray's door is always open unless he's on the phone with Washington.
This morning the elevator doors opened and the bullpen was still.
Not empty. The stillness of people pretending to work while straining to hear what was happening behind a closed door. Heads bent over files that weren't being read. Keyboards silent. The air itself felt tensed, like the building was holding its breath.
Ray's door was shut.
Emily stopped three steps off the elevator. She could hear voices through the wall. Not words, not from this distance, but tone. Multiple voices, professional, the cadence of men accustomed to speaking in rooms where their words carried authority.
And then, cutting through all of it, a voice she would have recognized from the bottom of the ocean.
Raised. Sharp. She couldn't make out words through the wall, but she didn't need words. She knew the tone the way she knew her own heartbeat.
Jake. And Jake Walsh didn't raise his voice.
Claire appeared beside her. Emily didn't know when she'd gotten up from her desk. Her face was pulled tight in a way Emily had only seen in courtrooms when a ruling went wrong.
"What's going on?"
"No idea, but it's bad." Claire's voice was low, pitched beneath the hum of the bullpen. "Three suits walked in twenty minutes ago. Practically dragged Jake into Ray's office. That's the first time I've heard him raise his voice since they went in."
Emily stared at the closed door. Behind it, the voices had dropped again. Whatever Jake had said, the room had absorbed it and recalibrated.
"My Jake?"
The words came out before she could think about them. Before she could edit them into a more more appropriate statement for a federal prosecutor standing in her building.My Jake.A declaration she didn’t plan to make.
Claire's expression softened.
"Your Jake."
Emily's bag was on her shoulder. Her coffee was in her hand, going cold without her noticing. She was standing in a hallway in a building where she'd built a career on reading situations and making decisions, and she couldn't make her feet move in either direction because the man she loved was behind a door she couldn't open and she didn't know why.
The door opened.
Jake walked out.
Emily had seen him in a hundred configurations over the past three weeks. Jake in the morning, sleep-soft and warm. Jake at The Anchor, laughing at Tommy's stories. Jake at a crimescene, his operator focus clicking into place like a scope finding its target. Jake in the dark, whispering things that made her forget every wall she'd ever built.
She had never seen this.
He moved through the bullpen like a ghost. His eyes were flat, carrying a blankness that radiated outward like a frequency only certain people could hear. His body was controlled, every step deliberate, but there was pressure underneath the control that Emily recognized from courtrooms when witnesses were about to break. A force building against a container that wasn't designed to hold it.
He was walking toward her.
